Assignment
4
Author’s
Note: Since we
have discussed the elements of mystery, adventure, and love stories, my writing
assignments for assignments 4, 5, and 6 are to write one of each story. The
first story I decided to focus on was the mystery story since those are
generally my favorite to read and write. As I wrote my story about my heroine
Antigone (pronounced “Ann-tigg-on-ee,” hence the nickname of “Tiggy”), I was
surprised at how much of myself I put into her, since I generally don’t like to
write characters that are autobiographical in nature. The story was written in
a marathon session over two days. The last time I wrote a story of this length,
it took me almost a month and a half of not-so diligent work on it to complete
it. I do intend at some point to further expand this story, and this is
definitely a rough sketch. I definitely see places in this story where I’d
touch up this or further explain that. Since the marathon writing session it
took to complete this story has wiped me out a bit in terms of ideas and
energies, don’t expect to see assignments 5 and 6 for a while yet since they
are not due until March 21.
Grade
Received: A-,
but only because I didn’t sufficiently “solve” the mystery about the cigarette case,
but I did get a lot of positive feedback from the professor and my classmates
Antigone
Rising
“Twiggy!” the clerk behind the counter at the kosher
deli bellowed above the din and clatter of the lunch rush.
She winced at yet another mispronunciation of her name.
Well, her nickname. Her given name was Antigone (she had been the victim of an
ancient Hellenic studies major turned college professor mother who’d had an
affair with a local tour guide during an undergraduate study-abroad semester in
Athens), but everyone (excluding her mother) called her “Tiggy” because most
people, being that they weren’t Greek, couldn’t figure out how to say her name
properly. But to confuse her with the supermodel Twiggy was a bit much. It
wasn’t that she wasn’t reasonably attractive in her own right—it was the fact
that she wasn’t a tall, willowy blond. She was short and had dark brown hair
and eyes. In fact, she looked like your typical Midwestern girl, not a
glamorous Brit.
She handed her debit card to the clerk and tossed
some loose change into the tip jar that is a standard feature at such
establishments.
“Hey, thanks,” the clerk said as he handed Tiggy her
receipt and sandwich. She then made her way through the hurried throng chatting
and texting away on their smartphones as they waited to pick up their orders.
As she exited the deli to the bustling metropolitan
street, she put in the earbuds to her iPod and started her latest playlist. One
of her favorite Fleetwood Mac songs, “Little Lies,” began to play as she made
her way north on the sidewalk towards the nearest number 4 bus line stop. As
she walked briskly to make the next bus, she glanced upon a rather slow-moving
man in the crowd in front of her. His deliberate pace, marked with a slight
limp, annoyed her a bit as she began to brush past him. C’mon, I’ve got to get
back to work in twenty minutes, she groused mentally as she picked up her pace
to get around him.
As she got next to him, she noticed that he was
gazing at her out of the corner of his eye. She took notice of him as their
eyes met. He was good-looking in a sleazy sort of way, with slicked-back
straw-blond hair and hazel eyes. She couldn’t read the expression on his face
or in his eyes, which puzzled her. Normally, she could read even the most stoic
person as though they were a child’s picture book, and the fact she couldn’t
read him troubled her somewhat.
He smiled knowingly at her, briefly nodded his head in
salutation, then quickly and deliberately dropped a square, shiny object at her
feet.
Convinced this was some sort of accident on his part
because she had almost stepped on the expensive-looking little box thing, she
bent down to retrieve the item.
“Hey, mister! You dropped this—” she began to say as
she stood up. However, the mysterious stranger was nowhere to be found.
She looked up and down and on both sides of the
street, but she couldn’t see him anywhere. She darted back a few paces to a
dead-end alley she’d passed as she’d tried to outpace him, but he wasn’t in the
alley, either. It was like he was a will-o’-the-wisp vanishing with the dawn.
She would’ve begun to swear upon all that is holy that he had merely been a
figment of her imagination had she not been holding the very real metallic
silver case he’d purposefully dropped at her feet.
She began to study the curious thing in her hand. It
was rectangular and rather flat and, except for some fancy engraving inlaid
with what appeared to be yellow and rose gold, was buffed to a high,
mirror-like shine. Odd, she thought. The only fingerprints on this thing are
mine.
Thinking back to her training as a jewelry store
clerk, she quickly turned the case over to see if she could find any
identifying marks to help her trace the owner. Her jaw dropped when she saw the
jeweler’s mark on the back.
“Oh my God! I have got to get this back to that
guy!” she almost screamed aloud. A few passersby in the crowd looked at her
strangely when they heard her exclamation, but they quickly moved on. She put
her hand over her gaping mouth.
“This is a custom-made Faberge and it’s twenty-four
karat!” she whispered. “He’s gonna say I stole it!”
The bus arrived, and she quickly took an empty seat.
She noticed there was a peculiar stone-inlaid mechanism on the seal of the
case. She gently touched the red-jeweled hinge. (“Oh no,” she thought, “that’s
probably a real ruby!”) The case gently sprung open.
It was an empty cigarette case—a rather odd thing to
have these days with all the anti-smoking laws and such—bearing an elaborate
inscription in a Cyrillic language she didn’t know. She was really about to
freak out about the fact that she couldn’t decipher the case’s inscription when
she noticed a part of the message she could read: an international phone number in Arabic
numerals.
She heaved a sigh of relief. Good, all I have to do
is call this number and tell that guy I found his cigarette case, she thought.
I’ll call him when I get back to work—my cell phone reception isn’t the
greatest in this part of town. I’ll be there any minute now.
However, her blood pressure dramatically spiked
again as “any minute now” stretched into forty-five due to a four-car accident
on the major artery that took her to the area of the city where she worked.
Painfully aware that with each passing moment, the mysterious stranger could be
one step closer to walking into the nearest police station and reporting the
cigarette case stolen, she could poignantly feel each powerful palpitation of
her heart as the bus sat and sat and sat on the highway.
By the time the bus stopped at its regular stop
three blocks from her workplace, Klopfenstein’s Pharmacy, she was near
apoplectic with worry. She sprinted the distance to the store’s back alley
employee entrance and nearly broke in the door.
“Whoa! What’s with you?” cried out a portly and
good-natured man who was weighing some powder on a scale behind the pharmacy
counter.
“Can’t talk, Dr. K.! I gotta use the office phone!”
she called to the pharmacist as she dashed her way into the back office.
She frantically dialed the phone, only to receive
the automaton operator voice that disappointingly told her to hang up or try
again later as the number she was dialing was out of service. She moaned in
despair.
“What is all this about?” demanded Dr. K. as he
walked into the back office.
Nearly in tears, Tiggy related her story to the
kindly pharmacy owner who was her boss.
“Huh. Is that so, Tigs?” he said in a perplexed
manner. “That is so weird! Better call the cops. A best defense is a good
offense. I’ll vouch for you.”
Tiggy dialed the local police precinct and related
to the receptionist who answered only that she’d found this fancy cigarette
case in the street and wanted to get it back to its rightful owner. She felt
that they wouldn’t believe the rest of her story, so she conveniently “forgot”
it. It could be “need to know” information—a highly classified secret, so to
say—between herself and her boss.
“All right,” the precinct’s secretary droned
absent-mindedly into the phone. “We’ll get a detective out there to get this—what
did you say it was?—oh, a cigarette case—as soon as possible. Thank you.”
“Thanks,” mumbled Tiggy as she hung up the phone.
She felt better knowing that someone official was coming to get it, but at the
same time, it gave her the heebie-jeebies just to have such an expensive item
in her possession, no matter how brief a period of time it was.
“Hey, Dr. K.! I’m going to put this in the safe
until the cop comes,” she called to her boss, who had returned to the
compounding part of the pharmacy to weigh more powder by this point.
“Good idea, Tigs.”
She made her way to the compounding part of the
pharmacy and began to peck away at the computer to check on any new orders that
had come in while she was on her lunch.
“Ugh. Of all the luck in the world…” she began
dejectedly.
“Yeah, Tigs,” Dr. K. said empathetically. “You sure
do have some strange luck.” He quickly changed the subject.
“How are your classes going? Need any help?”
“Oh, no,” she said distractedly. “I’m pulling a good
B-average in O-chem.”
“You mean the infamous ‘O-Hell chem’? Well, let’s
see if we can’t get that B average of yours up to an A after your shift ends
today,” the pharmacist replied. Tiggy had always loved how Dr. K. had taken a
friendly paternal interest in her and her grades since she’d told him of her
plans to go to pharmacy school after she finished up her bachelor degree in
neuroscience at City College during her job interview.
“Oh, sorry, I can’t today,” she said apologetically.
“I’ve got a test in my 4:30 anthropology class. Some other time. Thanks,
though.”
“Well, I’ll have Jason arrange a time to help you
study your organic chemistry,” Dr. K. said with a sly smile. He knew his son, a
pharmacy school resident who he was grooming to take over the family business,
and his pretty young pharmacy technician had taken a fancy to one another and
had a genuinely affectionate rapport. He was truly fond of Tiggy, too, and
hoped that someday wedding bells might be in the air for those two. She was an
extremely clever and pragmatic young woman and would definitely be an asset in
the family pharmacy, a good counter-balance to Jason’s somewhat dreamy nature.
Tiggy smiled shyly at his statement and felt a
slight blush spread over her face.
“Well, Dr. K., I better get to work. We had seven
orders come in while I was out, and you don’t pay me to talk about my weird
life,” she said with a laugh as she began to print off the new orders and
organize them into the appropriate categories for easier filling.
The rest of the day passed uneventfully, except for
the fact that the promised detective never showed up to collect the mystery
man’s cigarette case. It was somewhat strange that no one came, but the crime
rate in the city was very high, so maybe the city’s finest were otherwise
preoccupied. Noting that the detective hadn’t graced the pharmacy with his or
her presence, she asked Dr. K., whose judgment she trusted as much as, if not
more than, her own, what she should do.
“Tigs, I’d call that number in the case again. And
the cops, too. But at the very least, you should let the poor guy know you’ve
got his fancy case and that it hasn’t been melted down yet. He’s probably
worried sick about it.”
She dialed the strange number again. Thankfully the
call went through with this attempt. But it went straight to voicemail, which
heightened her anxieties again. Not only was the recorded message in a strange,
garbled language she didn’t understand, but it was also prompting her to enter
some sort of code she didn’t know. She quickly hung up on the recording, a sinking
feeling in her stomach. I’m never going to find this guy, her inner voice
wailed in despair.
As she reached down to the office phone’s dial pad
to dial the local police precinct, the phone rang shrilly.
“Klopfenstein’s, Antigone speaking! How may I help
you?” she said in her most professional manner, trying not to betray that she
was in any way troubled by anything.
A deep, heavily accented voice came over the
line: “No police action is necessary.
Await further instructions.”
“What? Who is this? Is this some sort of joke?” she
nearly screamed into the receiver.
“Await further instructions. That is all.”
The line then went dead.
Her heart sank. That feeling she always got in the
pit of her stomach whenever she read someone like a book hit her hard. She knew
that the owner of the voice knew she had the case. She also knew that she had
to do exactly what the voice said without asking any questions. It was a life
or death matter, and her life was on the line.
“Hey Tiggy! Who was that?” asked Jason as he stepped
into the back office to take over the pharmaceutical duties from his father for
the day.
She looked at him painfully.
“Please don’t make me explain!” she whispered, tears
in her eyes.
“What’s going on? Who called?” asked Dr. K. as he
barged into the office to check on Tiggy, whose tone during the phone call had
alarmed him.
“That call—I need to leave now—with the case—” she
half-whispered, half-sobbed. She abruptly gathered up her coat, purse, and cell
phone and began to dial the combination on the safe to retrieve the case.
“Wait! Where are you going?” sputtered father and
son in unison.
“I don’t—I can’t—I’ll be O. K.!” she cried as she
grabbed the case, slammed the safe door closed, and made her way to the back
door of the pharmacy as quickly as she could. For some reason, she had felt the
urge to be extremely secretive and ashamed around the two people around whom
she’d always felt the most comfortable.
As soon as she reached the alley behind the
pharmacy, her cell phone screamed for her attention.
“Hello?” she nearly shrieked. She was terrified.
The voice answered.
“Take a cab to 223 North Columbus. Give the driver
the fifty-dollar bill in your wallet. Yes, your emergency cash. No questions.
That is all.”
The call ended before she could protest, so she
blindly followed the instructions she’d been given, wondering how the voice
knew about the money she kept in her wallet’s secret pocket. She hailed a cab
as soon as she reached the street, gave the driver the address, and within
about twenty minutes she was in a grubby, bleak, and deserted warehouse
district by the waterfront. She was petrified.
“Hey, lady, 223 don’t exist nowhere,” barked the
cabbie. “You want me to stop here? This is 219. The next one is 225.”
“Um, yeah. That’s fine,” she said distractedly. That
address had to be around here somewhere, she thought. She quickly paid the fare
with her debit card. Then she remembered the instruction about the fifty-dollar
bill.
“Here!” she said as she shoved the bill into the
cabbie’s face and stepped out of the vehicle. She heard the door slam eerily
behind her.
“Hey lady! Thanks!” called the cabbie out of his
driver’s side window as he began to speed off. This part of town didn’t just give
Tiggy the creeps
.
She stood and stared at the deserted landscape, her
nerves on edge, waiting for someone or something to appear. The deafening
silence of the wharf enveloped her.
The sun had begun to set, and the sharp, unforgiving
winter wind that blew off the lake whipped through her hair, tore at her face,
and chilled her bones.
Suddenly, a distant tugboat let out a muted blast on
its smokestack. She nearly leapt out of her skin and whirled around, looking
for the source, even though she knew from where it had originated.
She wrapped her arms tightly around her chest in a
desperate attempt to stay tolerably warm and prayed that whoever was going to
show up would just hurry up about it because she was terribly cold.
As if on cue, she heard the rumble of a powerful car
engine as it sped towards her. Panicked, she looked for a place to hide but
could only press herself tightly against the side of an empty warehouse as the
lumbering black luxury sedan squealed to a stop in front of her. The rear door
nearest to her opened.
“Get in,” said the man who possessed the voice on
the phone. His tone was rather abrupt and demanding, and it instantly offended
her. He was an extremely large and swarthy dark haired man with a long scar on
the left side of his face and one black beady eye that glared at her from the
right.
Angered by the whole situation, Tiggy glared at him
harshly and reached into the coat pocket where she kept her trusty Swiss Army
knife. What did this creeper want with her, anyway? How dare he just demand
that she just get into a car with him with no explanation!
“No!” shouted Tiggy.
“I’m not
getting into that car with you! Here’s your stupid cigarette case!” she spat
furiously as she threw the expensive item at him. It landed at his feet just as
he stepped out of the car. He didn’t even glance at it as it clattered on the
ground in front of him.
“Look! Don’t make me force you to come with me!” the
one-eyed stranger said almost apologetically.
“No! Absolutely not! Go to hell!” Her eyes and
countenance were wild with defiance. She was psychically daring him to come
within arm’s reach of her. Just you come a little closer and you’ll be so
sorry, her inner voice snarled. She pulled out the knife and extended its
respectable blade.
“Don’t you come near me!” she hissed at him in a
blind rage as she showed him the business end of the instrument.
“Have it your way,” the one-eyed man said
matter-of-factly as he calmly began to walk towards her.
“Stay back!” she cried as she began to wildly swing
the knife blade at him with each step he took. But he was nonplussed. From his
appearance alone, she could tell that the man was a fierce fighter who could
handle a large dose of pain. I might want to consider running, she thought.
She turned in order to attempt to run off, but
instead of freedom, she came face-to-face with another man who’d seemingly
appeared out of nowhere. This man looked like a shady small-town used car
salesman. He was small in stature and frame and had a bleach-blond mullet,
yellow-lensed aviator sunglasses, and a loudly patterned brown and green plaid
blazer.
“Night night,” he said with a gold-tooth revealing
slimy smile as he pressed a cloth saturated with some sort of pungent chemical
over her nose and mouth. She fought back wildly for a moment, but the little
dude was frighteningly strong, and she quickly lost consciousness.
When she woke up, night had decidedly fallen, and
her bleary eyes revealed that she was in the back seat of the luxury car that
had pulled up next to her earlier, sandwiched between Mr. Mullet and One-Eye.
She expected their aromas to be as repulsive as their countenances were and
their behaviors had been, but she was pleasantly surprised. Mr. Mullet smelled
pleasantly of a fine men’s cologne and One-Eye smelled like Downy fabric
softener. Hey, if I’ve got to be wedged between psychos, at least I don’t have
to smell creepy funk, too, she thought.
There was an oppressive silence between all of the
car’s occupants. The car’s radio softly played classical music while the heater
emitted a pleasant warmth.
“So yer awake,” drawled Mr. Mullet with a Southern
accent that is peculiar to West Texans. He had removed the hideous blazer and
was now wearing a pair of neatly -pressed khakis and a simple white button-up
shirt. He smiled genially at her. She was not impressed, and the expression on
her face revealed that fact. He lost the smile.
She was about to resume her escape attempt when she
saw that Mr. Mullet was packing serious heat in both a shoulder holster and a
gun belt at his waist. She decided it would be best not to try anything fancy.
She also decided that if anyone in the car decided to ask questions, it might
not be a good idea to be flippant.
“Great, I’m a prisoner, and I have to mind my manners. Worst. Day. Ever,” she thought. Mr.
Mullet looked at her again, and she couldn’t help but glare at him. She was
still pretty irritated about the whole ordeal, and she was going to let
everyone in the car know about it in the subtlest manner so she didn’t get
killed and dumped on the side of the road.
You’re
not getting off the hook that easy, her eyes said to Mr.
Mullet. Don’t even think I’m remotely
happy about waking up next to you.
He cleared his throat and began talking to her as
though they had been having some sort of witty and friendly tête-à-tête, as
though he hadn’t just muzzled her with a chloroform-soaked cloth and help stuff
her into the back seat of an unfamiliar car that was speeding down the highway
towards destinations unknown.
“So, Antigone, are ya hungry? Thirsty?”
“No,” she said suspiciously as her eyes narrowed
when their mutual gazes met. “Um, you just shoved a caustic rag into my face
and forced me into this car. No offense, but it might not be such a good idea
for me to accept any source of nourishment from you.”
He guffawed at this while One-Eye sat stonily silent
and gazed out of the car’s side window.
“Don’t force her into anything else,” One-Eye
suddenly said authoritatively. “We have our instructions!”
At this, Mr. Mullet fell into a somber mood. “Yer
right, Laszlo, yer right.”
At this, Tiggy perked up.
“Hey! What the hell is this about? Instructions?
What instructions?” Tiggy said indignantly as she simultaneously began to
think: “You can take your instructions
and—”
“And what?” said Laszlo sharply, abruptly cutting
off her thoughts. He glared at her with his one eye.
She was perplexed and alarmed. Had he just read her
mind?
Mr. Mullet started to dryly offer an
explanation: “Yes, we can all,
quote-unquote, read your mind. Everyone in this car. In fact— ”
“Sam! Shut up! She is not to know!” Laszlo barked.
“Not to know about what?” Tiggy said apprehensively.
This is getting too weird, she thought.
“You will understand when you meet with Dr.
Teppler,” Laszlo replied curtly.
“Excuse me, but aren’t I at least owed some sort of
explanation about all this?” she said warily. Clearly, she’d pushed some of
Laszlo One-Eye’s buttons with her words and thoughts, and she didn’t want to
further aggrieve him because he seemed more dangerous than Sam Mullet. Mullet
Man was clearly the strength and speed of the two, but she was pretty sure Ol’
Black Eye was the evil.
“Would you kindly stop referring to me as ‘One-Eye’
in your thoughts?” said Laszlo peevishly. “Yes, I can hear them, and therefore
it is rude to keep insulting me by thinking of me by that! I lost my eye when I
was a child in Kosovo and took some shrapnel from a bomb to the face—” He was
growing angrier as he went on, so Tiggy quickly cut him off.
“Sorry! I’m sorry! If you’d come up to me and
introduced yourself, I swear I wouldn’t have thought about your eye!”
“Oh, don’t give me that crap! Everyone thinks about
my eye! I can read minds, remember?”
“Sorry! You’re right! But I wouldn’t have thought
you were such a—”
“Hey! Watch your mouth! It ain’t ladylike to swear
like you do!” interjected Sam. “And the last name’s Bookings, not ‘Mullet’! In
fact, this ugly thing is a wig.” He pulled off the long blond abomination to
reveal a military-style buzz cut beneath. He also popped off the gold tooth cap
and showed it to her. “See? It’s all a disguise.”
“Sam! What are you doing?” Laszlo cried
incredulously.
“Aww hell, Laszlo, we’re almost to the base, so she
might as well know something!” Sam said fiercely.
Tiggy was beginning to warm up to Sam somewhat. She
felt he’d at least be as honest as he could be with her about this whole ordeal
eventually. Clearly this level of secrecy was already starting to get to him,
which she knew she could, at some point, work to her advantage, even if she
couldn’t read him yet. That fact alone made her distrust him less than Laszlo.
She felt that Sam could potentially be reasoned with, while Laszlo seemed like
he was just one big, inflexible turd.
It was a moonless night, and the oppressive darkness
of the remote area they were now driving in was practically suffocating. It
didn’t help that about ten miles back, the driver had suddenly switched off the
car’s headlights and was driving totally blind. Not that you could tell from
the way he was driving on the winding, hilly, heavily forested roads. Obviously
the man was a pro at night driving sans lights and knew exactly where they were
going.
They eventually came upon the tallest chain-link
fence topped with razor wire that Tiggy had ever seen. There was one white
streetlight lighting an entryway in the fencing. Two armed guards in olive drab
military uniforms with black berets stood beneath the light and in front of a
gate. Another guard was standing on the other side of the fence, about six feet
away from the gate. He was holding a leash with a rather large dog at the end
of it that was pulling at the lead with aggressive anxiety and whining and
whimpering loudly. Clearly, the canine wanted blood. Badly. Tiggy swallowed
hard. Now was not the time to bring up her extreme fear of dogs, verbally or
psychologically.
Tiggy stared at the dog with an almost crazed intent
and tried to moderate her rapid, shallow breathing. While everyone at the gate
was equally menacing, Fido took the cake in her eyes. He was some sort of
shepherd type that had clearly been specially bred to be monstrously large and
fiercely powerful and obviously had the personality traits that would allow him
to happily disembowel you with a single bite the moment he was given the
command to do so.
She swallowed hard. I take it I should stay away
from Dogzilla there, she thought as the car slowed for the guards.
“Once you are done with your lessons with Dr.
Teppler, dogs like that won’t pose a problem for you,” Laszlo quipped as he,
Sam, and the car’s driver flashed special badges at the checkpoint. The guards
waved them through and saluted.
Once the momentary danger of being eaten alive by
Dogzilla had passed as they drove through the gate, Tiggy began to relax a bit.
“Um, where are we, or can’t I know that?” she asked.
“Let’s just say we’re in the middle of Michigan’s
Upper Peninsula,” said Sam as he let out a small yawn.
“What? I was in downtown Rapid City when you grabbed
me! How long have we been driving?”
“It’s about 11:30 local time,” said Laszlo, “so
about eight and a half hours.”
“Why that long? We should be in Canada at that
rate!”
“We cannot take direct routes on missions such as
this,” Laszlo sighed.
“All right,” Tiggy said, not entirely satisfied with
that explanation. “So this place we’re going to, does it have a name, or is
that classified information, too?”
After about a ten-minute silence, her question was
finally answered.
“Technically, it doesn’t have a name,” said Sam. “We
just call it ‘Hogwarts’ for shits and giggles.”
At this point, they had pulled up in front of an
imposing windowless building constructed of concrete blocks and topped with
more razor wire. Only the occasionally occurring turret, complete with pacing armed
guards, broke up the roofline of the otherwise standard-issue rectangular
government-constructed fortress.
“What the hell is this place? A prison?” asked
Tiggy, alarm creeping into her voice.
“Naw,” drawled Sam
lazily. It was obviously past his bedtime, she noted as she began to get a
slight read on him. “We call it ‘Hogwarts’ because it’s just like that—a sort
of special school for people with—um—extraordinary abilities.”
“Well, then, have you
got the wrong person!” she exclaimed with a soft laugh. “I’m about as average
as they come. The joke’s on you. And whoever sent you.”
“Nonsense,” said Laszlo
confidently as he opened the car door and flashed his badge at another set of
guards who saluted and then opened a set of heavily-barred steel doors. He
turned to her. “Are you going to come peacefully with me now, or will we have a
repeat of this afternoon’s drama?”
Tiggy glared at Laszlo
for his snotty sarcasm. If you can really
read my mind or whatever, then you already know the answer to that question,
she thought, clearly annoyed.
“Good,” chirped Laszlo,
whose mood was noticeably improving. “I’m a bit tired of dragging women around
today.”
“Impertinence ain’t
your strong suit, kid,” said Sam as they made their way inside the fortress.
She shot him a dirty look. She hated to be called “kid.”
“I know that,” said Sam
with a laugh as they made their way down an aggressively bright and rather
narrow hallway. “That’s to get you back for referring to me as ‘Mullet’ for
half the evening.”
They entered a large,
nearly vacant, and poorly-lit room and sat in some rather comfortable chairs
surrounding a large conference table. Three men then walked in. One was in a
military uniform similar to the ones worn by the guards, one was in a smart
gray suit with a royal purple tie, and one was in a white medical lab jacket.
The man in the lab jacket spoke first.
“Ah, Miss Antigone
Polynices, so at least we meet,” he said quietly and evening with a slight hint
of a Scottish accent. Tiggy immediately recognized him as the man who had
dropped the cigarette case in the street.
“You must be Dr.
Teppler,” she said, her original wariness and skepticism returning.
“Yes. I am Dr.
Alexander Teppler, and these are my colleagues, CIA Special Agent Rhine Shelton
and General Michael McMorrison,” he replied as he gestured first to the man in
the suit and then to the man in the military garb.
Tiggy could read the
general like an extremely simple children’s book, a fact which relieved her
since she had spent the majority of her day being unable to read anyone she’d
encountered since she’d retrieved the cigarette case off of the ground.
Unfortunately, he was the only person in the room she could read. As she looked
him over knowingly, he shifted uncomfortably on his feet and scowled. Whatever
goes on here, he doesn’t believe in it, she thought.
“This better be good,
Teppler,” McMorrison barked gruffly as he took a seat at the table on the side
opposite of Tiggy and her escorts.
“I can assure you it
will be,” said Teppler smoothly. “Miss Polynices here already knows you are
skeptical about my research and the program we run here.”
“Look, the DOD’s got a
shitload of money tied up in this. If word gets out that we’re spending what
we’re spending on hocus-pocus, the public will have a coronary!” McMorrison
shot back, clearly unconvinced by Teppler’s statement of reassurance. Tiggy
could clearly see that the general thought that his time was being wasted with
this whole endeavor. No special abilities—if she really had any—were needed for
that.
“DOD stands for
Department of Defense,” said Shelton in response to Tiggy’s wondering at the
acronym. “But we at the CIA are very interested in the program here, as well.
And, yes, I just heard your thoughts, too. In fact, the only one in this room
who can’t hear them is General McMorrison, which is why he is so—well, how
should I say it?—cautious about this whole project.”
“O. K. That’s just
freakin’ creepy!” Tiggy said before she could stop herself. She immediately
felt a sense of embarrassment as everyone in the room, except for McMorrison,
laughed heartily.
“She has a point,”
grunted the general.
“Yes,” cooed Dr.
Teppler good naturedly. “At first, being around others with your abilities
makes one feel, well, a bit naked, at least psychically. But you will learn how
to close yourself off to unwanted ‘mental espionage,’ as we call it.”
“Um, O. K.,” said the
still disbelieving Tiggy. “So, you really think I should be here?”
“But of course!”
replied the doctor enthusiastically. “You see, my dear, you are literally one
in a billion! Your gifts are quite unique and extraordinary!”
“And what gifts would
those be?” she asked, clearly mystified at the fact that she could be anything
other than Plain Jane ordinary. He continued:
“Well—how should I
explain it?—your grandmother called it your ‘knowing.’ As I recall, she was
always saying: ‘Well Tiggy’s just so
clever about things—she just knows.’
“Do you remember your
mother taking you to see Dr. Helene Lirette throughout your childhood at
Spalding State University?”
“Uh, yeah,” replied
Tiggy. “She was a really nice lady and we played a lot of fun games, but I
still don’t see where this is going.”
“Well,” explained the
doctor. “Dr. Lirette was my predecessor in this program, which we call ‘Acute
Psychotelekinetic Sensitivities,’ or ‘APS’ for short. Basically, we determined
through all of those tests you took as a child—oh, you were told they were
games as a child to ensure your complete cooperation—that you possess a range
of mental abilities beyond that of the average, or even highly above average,
human being.
“The point of this
program is to help you fully manifest those abilities in your day-to-day life,
as we feel they are highly desirable qualities to be totally aware and totally
in control of.”
“But why not just tell
me that?” Tiggy said incredulously. “Why the whole bit with the cigarette
case?”
“Would you have
believed in all of this had I merely phoned you or sent you a form letter?” Dr.
Teppler said as he made deep direct eye contact with her. She quickly looked
away.
“Probably not,” she
sighed.
“Exactly my point, my
dear! Exactly my point! Now do you understand?”
“O. K. So I have some
special powers, but what’s with the government cheese in the room?” she said as
she looked at Shelton and McMorrison.
“Well,” Shelton
answered, “we at the CIA feel that people with your abilities could do quite a
bit of good for our national security, and I’m sure the brass at the Pentagon
would agree.” He stole a sideways glance at McMorrison, who merely grunted and
crossed his arms on the table in front of him.
“But shouldn’t I have a
choice about getting involved in this kind of stuff?” Tiggy asked warily.
“No, you don’t,” came
General McMorrison’s overly stern and deadly serious reply as he stared her
down and scowled.
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